Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 299
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similar to that employed in the proposal of syntactic universals;
entities, and relationships, are to be assumed, but they may
differ in individual languages. While a framework was available
for phonological study in the nineteenth century, one was
lacking for syntactic study.
As one of its contributions to general linguistics, transforma-
tional syntax has begun to give us such a framework, and
with it possibilities of explaining syntactic structures, as I will
illustrate below.10 This contribution results in part from the
separation of syntactic from semantic questions, in part from
the application to syntax of structural principles similar to
those which the phonologists of several decades ago applied
to phonology.
The syntactic structures proposed are not only sentence
patterns, but also smaller syntactic structures, with specific
interrelationships to the sentence patterns. As we might expect
from scarcely more than a decade of study, our possibilities of
syntactic explanation are still slight. But syntactic entities are
being related to specific syntactic types, as by Greenberg. It
is fairly well established that some languages have a clause
structure in which the order of subject, verb, and object is
VSO, as in many of the Semitic languages, others in which
it is SVO, as in European languages of the Indo-European
family, and others in which it is SOV, as in the Uralic lan-
guages, at an earlier stage of their development, or in Japanese.
It is also well established that in VSO and SVO languages
10Sievers (1885) provides a convenient summary of the phonetic framework
used in nineteenth century publications. A syntactic framework was given by
Ghomsky 1965. For an attempt to determine syntactic universals and their
relationship to one another, see the article by Greenberg, ‘Some Universals
of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements’
(1966:73-113). For an analysis of the syntactic system of the Uralic languages,
see A. Sauvageot’s treatment in Meillet-Cohen 1952:279-318. Ross (1967) deals
with syntactic features within a general syntactic theory. Observations of his
and of Greenberg’s have been used productively by Bach in his paper ‘Is Amharic
an SOV Language?’ I am also grateful to Professor Bach for comments on this
paper.